|
Volume 13, No. 8, 27 February 2014 |
|
|
|
Red Alert Confront liberal opportunism and a politics of opposition in media |
By Kgaogelo Kgolomodumo
This past weekend a number of political parties launched their manifestos for the forthcoming May 7th elections. All of these manifestos are premised on the manifesto of the ANC-led alliance as reference point, but in hostile way.
The difference in the one extreme is that there is located one manifesto that has gone up but too far in space, by making unviable if not unrealistic populist promises that are chaos-ridden. The recklessness in this extreme will inevitably disrupt and destroy our country in no time. In another extreme there is located one manifesto that reflects an agenda to conserve and augment the socio-economic gains acquired on a racist basis to the disadvantage of the historically oppressed under the racist colonial and apartheid regime. It is upon this conservatism that a racist liberal agenda is forged to prevent the democratic government from intervening in the economy to redress the imbalances of the past through affirming the historically and previously disadvantaged. This agenda seeks to resist transformation and replace it with liberal reformism.
Paging through the press it is clear that many oppositions against the ANC receive prominent coverage and are sparred critical if not given favourable but embedded analysis. Some broadcasters in radio and television have also not been rigorous in scrutinising the oppositions' manifestos. In a democracy, one would have expected a robust examination of these manifestos.
In fact, large but not all sections of the print media have shown that there's nothing neutral, objective, fair and balanced reporting. The dominant sections of the mainstream press have actually become an instrument on the part of others to pursue a politics of opposition against the ANC and an array of all other progressive and revolutionary forces and the government that it is leading.
Reflecting on all this one had to come back and revisit her unpublished letter, responding to Mr Mondli Makhanya, shortly after the ANC's manifesto was launched in January. I have since edited the letter with additional content into this small piece and asked for Umsebenzi Online for publication. Let's move South Africa forward now.
Makhanya is editor at large who contributes to the City Press, now every Sunday. His 'editorials at large' are anti-ANC and are littered with hatred against our President, comrade Jacob Zuma. Makhanya's 'editorials at large' would not say anything when others make a motion for constitutional amendment in parliament, but would jump to paint as irrational any talk of constitutional amendment when the ANC and particularly President Zuma talk about the need to amend the constitution when it becomes necessary.
Makhanya penned an 'editorial at large' in the City Press (19 January 2014) entitled 'Constitution not for politicking'. Makhanya spits all sorts of labels against President Jacob Zuma and unidentified others in the ANC. He writes that they are: riding in a "populist bandwagon”, engaging in a "loose talk”, "anti-constitutionalist”, making "wild statements that portray the constitution as the enemy of the people and the cause of their continued economic oppression”, and are engaging in "anti-constitution populism”. All these hollow labels that are absolutely empty of any constructive and intellectual content represent the poverty of philosophy characteristic of a deep-seated anger of some defeated project seeking refuge in opportunistic liberalism.
Makhanya cautions against politicking on our constitution. But his work, whose essential content is summed up by his labelling of others as quoted above, represents the worst type of politicking not only on the constitution but also on others. If his labels are to be adopted to seek clarity who he probably is, Makhanya could fit the character that they define very well but dressed in anti-majoritarian liberalism of an opportunistic type hoping if not longing and therefore advocating for a decline of the ANC. Evidence for this is to be found in the thrust of his argument, which forms his conclusion as well.
For Makhanya, amending the constitution amounts to interference. The constitution, he argues, must be treated like "the New Testament, the Qur'an or the Torah”. Notice this, not the Bible, but "the New Testament, the Qur'an”, etc. Why this selective liberalism to both history and the truth? The answer is embedded in Makhanya's politicking against considerations for amendment to the constitution when it becomes necessary. He chooses the 'New Testament' and not the Bible as a whole, because the latter is made up of both the 'Old Testament' and 'New Testament', and because in his mind any mention of the Bible as a whole would highlight his argument's anti-thesis, i.e. the necessity to adopt changes (i.e. amendments) to keep pace with the continually changing conditions. Makhanya has lost it completely.
Let's set the record straight.
Firstly, our constitution is a product of politics and it is therefore not only a legal document. It was negotiated and adopted by political parties with others for and others against. The ANC as the majority party adopted the constitution, which is also a political document that is subject to changes in politics but not the empty rhetoric in the province of Makhayna's politicking characterised by the hurling of hollow labels against others. Had the ANC not adopted the constitution no other political party or a combination of political parties would have had sufficient strength to have it adopted. Makhanya's labelling of the ANC as anti-constitutionalist is therefore a figment of his abstract liberal imagination.
Secondly, our constitution is not opposed from being amended when it's necessary. On the contrary, it makes provisions in sections 44 and 74 to be amended. Talking about the need to amend the constitution as and when it becomes necessary as President Zuma did in the run up to ANC's manifesto launch is therefore not unconstitutional. Neither is it anti-constitutionalist. Anti-constitutionalists are people who want to do away with the constitution and replace it with anarchy. People like Makhanya who are against provisions in the constitution for its amendment are another strand of anti-constitutionalists.
Makhanya's argument against the need for introducing amendments to the constitution when it becomes necessary is against the spirit of the constitution itself. The nature of constitutional democracy consist among others in campaigning to amend the constitution when it becomes necessary, for example in line with a programme of transformation which may require constitutional amendment to become successful. In a democratic electoral contest, it's not wrong therefore to campaign to secure sufficient majority for amending the constitution when it becomes necessary. On the contrary, that what political formations that are worth taking seriously seek to achieve.
Lastly, for Makhanya to suggest that there were no compromises when the constitution was negotiated is just absolutely untrue if not grossly ignorant and misleading. On the contrary, there were indeed compromises. What is in the constitution is not necessarily everything that every party that was involved in the negotiations wanted. And, Makhaya should know that by their very nature compromises are not permanent.
In our case, we achieved political democracy through the 1994 democratic breakthrough which was led by the ANC in alliance with the Communist Party and the progressive trade union and civic movements leading an array of many formations of the mass democratic movement. We did not simultaneously achieve economic emancipation. Ownership and control in the economy remained in the very same hands that exploited our people as it was during the colonial and apartheid eras. And, this very ownership and control which came from the history of the wars of colonial conquest and dispossession against our people including primitive accumulation involving among others bloody and legislative expropriation were protected in our constitution.
Political changes that inform considerations for constitutional amendment are therefore inextricably interconnected to dynamics in the economy, the vision we would like to achieve in that realm and the pace of transformation. To the extent there's no movement forward or the pace of transformation is too slow to respond to the overwhelming material and cultural needs of the people and the vision of a society we would like to achieve then answers must be sought on what is to be done. And if considerations for constitutional amendment are necessary in that search for answers then it cannot be wrong by default to think about this.
The example of people like Makhanya who consistently use their occupations in the media to drive anti-ANC politics of opposition and the generally prevailing hostility in some media houses against our ANC-led movement, coupled with the showering of biased profiling of opposition parties should be noted with a sense of deep concern. This past Monday one daily newspaper dedicated almost more than one page to a single opposition party's manifesto launch coupled with anti-ANC and anti-President Zuma embedded reporting. The biased reporting on the rallies held last Saturday in Tembisa by the ANCYL and one larva political party in favour of the latter is another example.
As all this shows that the principles of objective, fair, balanced and even accurate reporting in the media have been turned into an empty rhetoric that is not observed but used to propagate the ideas of the strategic opponents of our movement and revolution. As revolutionaries we have spaces too. It's time we wield power in these spaces to confront the entire opposition for what it is, regardless of the mask that it is wearing in the media and elsewhere. In addition, we must deepen our work in alternative media platforms and the most reliable mediums such as strong organisation on the ground through which we must constantly report directly to the people as a whole in combat with all hostile media reports.
Kgaogelo Kgolomodumo is an open learning BA student from Monsterloos based in Tshwane where she is active in the revolutionary movement, and she writes in her personal capacity.
Community protests and the problems of so-called "delivery”
By Jeremy Cronin
In his state of the nation address earlier this month, president Zuma said something that didn't make sense to many, certainly not to the inveterate sceptics on the opposition benches. The explanation for the eruption of community protests, cde Zuma said, gets blamed on the "alleged failures of government”.
"However the protests are not simply the result of failures of government”, he insisted, "but also of the success in delivering basic services. When 95 percent of households have access to water, the 5 percent who still need to be provided for, feel they cannot wait a moment longer. Success is also the breeding ground of rising expectations.”
True, the president's speech-writers might have elaborated the argument more clearly. True, very impressive advances - 92 percent of South Africans now have access to potable water, compared to 60 percent in 1996 - need to be tempered with the understanding that not all township taps consistently have running water in them. We're all familiar with the sorry tales of poor maintenance or cut-offs.
Nonetheless the nub of the argument in cde Zuma's address is absolutely valid. Paradoxical as it might seem, the provision of services into poor communities, rather than the absolute absence of them, lies at the heart of much community protest. This is a key finding of a number of independent research institutions, including Municipal IQ, the SA Institute of Race Relations, and the Community Law Centre. While there are multiple and complex immediate factors behind the eruption of a community protest, the research points to the underlying phenomenon of relative deprivation.
Kevin Allan and Karen Heese of Municipal IQ, for instance, write that "although service delivery protests are commonly perceived as an indication of a failure of local government, Municipal IQ has found a strong link between municipal productivity (a measure of local government success) and service delivery protests."Their research into municipalities where protests occur indicates that, while they are areas of considerable poverty and unemployment, "they still have better access to local services than residents in the poorest municipalities in our rural areas and indeed than a national average”.
As Allan and Heese argue, the epicentre of protest tends to be in the poorer more marginalised parts of urban townships. These are communities that contrast their sense of deprivation with what they can see across the clutter of their own zinc roofs, over there, close by in a marginally better, more established neighbouring ward. The research also connects this unevenness in services among neighbouring wards to the impact of burgeoning urbanisation. Areas in which RDP houses have been built, or electricity provided become magnets for thousands more families, rural poor migrating to the outskirts of perceived economic opportunities. President Zuma was not wrong, therefore, to argue that it is often the very real but inevitably uneven provision of services that has underpinned community protests.
But there is another and more insidious sense in which the provision of services lies behind township protest. It is the manner in which these services get provided - typically by way of municipal tendering.
Born in the late-1990s, democratic local government was at the epicentre of the key contradictions of the period. There were tensions between new policies and legislation that envisaged social justice and popular participatory local democracy, on the one hand, and tough fiscal austerity measures, on the other. For the first time in South African history there was wall-to-wall municipal demarcation, embracing millions of voting citizens previously outside of any democratic municipal dispensation. But this positive step was overlaid upon the precarious foundations of the old business and suburban rates base that once funded white minority municipal welfarism. Municipalities now covered a huge swathe of population but in a largely unchanged, racialised geography. Hugely expanded but under-funded mandates saw municipalities downsizing work-forces, outsourcing and commodifying service provision.
Enter the tender. Unlike provincial and national government where there is a relatively clear demarcation between legislatures and executives, in local government the role of elected representatives in exercising oversight on executive decisions is more blurred. With limited budgets and still more limited institutional capacity, many councils are left with one critical power - the awarding of tenders. Business Day journalist, Carol Paton, has written a fascinating report on the recent violent protests in Bekkersdal, Mothutlung and Bronkhorstspruit. My SACP colleague, Solly Mapaila bravely entered all three townships while the tyre barricades were still burning. Together with a team of organisers, he engaged communities and authorities in order to restore some sanity to the situation. He has come to essentially the same conclusions as Paton.
While the immediate issues were different in the three townships- electricity billing, water shortages, a steep hike in grave fees - in every case, competing ANC factions linked to former councillors and now out of favour, local small businesses, were behind the mobilisation of angry youth. In deeply frustrated communities, allegations - well-founded or not - of corruption and misspending easily gain traction. And so, once again, it's not so much the absence of services but desperate competition over who controls their allocation that triggers protest.
What's to be done? The tendered outsourcing of services needs to be reversed through re-building democratic municipal capacity. This will take time. Where tendering remains it needs to be opened up to community scrutiny. This means substantive, not ritualised public participation in local development planning and oversight. And finally, government's very welcome, if belated, integrated urban development framework policy opens up the possibility to engage with urbanisation in positive rather than reactive ways.
Cde Jeremy Cronin is SACP's 1st Deputy General Secretary, and the articles was first published in 'Left Turn' column by the Cape Times, 26 February 2014.
Solidarity Statement with Ukraine
By Communist Parties
Given that the escalation of the political conflict in Ukraine is the result of the struggle of oligarchic groups for the post of President of Ukraine, which is for the general world and Ukrainian public is given for "the desire of Ukrainians to European values".
Paying attention to the facts brazen interference of foreign countries, especially the EU and U.S. in the internal affairs of an independent and sovereign Ukraine, which were, in fact, instigators in the escalation of social conflict, the clearest example of the realization of which is the realization of technology policy "color revolutions", the implementation of which we are seeing in recent years in Yugoslavia , Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, countries in the Arab world - to achieve their geopolitical goals, but certainly not to protect the interests of the absolute majority of the peoples of these countries.
Stressing that the citizens of Ukraine are on different sides of the conflict are not able today to fully observe and evaluate their class interests in opposition, and, in fact, protect the squares and "maidans" the interests of big capital.
Expressing grave concern that under the conditions of severe political and economic crisis in Ukraine, clearly raises his head fascism, which is a direct descendant of bourgeois Ukrainian integral nationalism, xenophobia, Russo phobia national intolerance that have a direct result of government pandering to these phenomena and contradictions.
Parties which are members of Working Group for preparation for the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties:
- Condemn foreign interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine, which leads to an escalation of social and political confrontation.
- Consider all citizens of Ukraine and sober social and political forces in Ukraine to prevent further spread of xenophobia, fascism, militant nationalism.
- Recognize that the responsibility for violent behavior equally rests on the political forces representing major oligarchic capital - the ruling Party and the leaders of the so-called "opposition", as well as American and European politicians, inflammatory activity which led to casualties.
- Support the initiative of the Communist Party of Ukraine, for the referendum, which could enable the people of Ukraine to exercise their legal right to choice of the vector foreign policy and economic integration.
- Stop the crimes against the people and communists of Ukraine
Today in Kiev, a despicable act of vandalism was carried out by fascists and the ultra-nationalists. According to reports the headquarters of the Communist Party of Ukraine was burnt downed and totally destroyed in an act of vandalism.
We hold the European Union (EU), US and the fascists elements responsible for this despicable act of anti-communism and downright lumpiness.
We hereby reaffirm our steadfast solidarity with the people and communists of Ukraine.
Beirut, 22nd of February 2014
Communist Party of Brazil
Communist Party of Cuba
Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia
Communist Party of Ecuador
Lebanese Communist Party
Palestinian communist Party
Portuguese Communist Party
Communist Party of the Russian Federation
South African Communist Party
Syrian Communist Party
Syrian Communist Party (unified)
Communist Party of Turkey
Communist Party of Ukraine
Prince Mashele and Mzukisi Qobo: Their book on ANC reads like propaganda
By Cde Gwede Mantashe
In their treatment of events in history and society, intellectuals are required to take their responsibility seriously. Those who write must assume a greater responsibility. This demands they are accurate and factual in their treatment of the topic, historical events and research data.The reason is to ensure that literature, like the book 'The Fall of the ANC, What Next?' by Prince Mashele and Mzukisi Qobo, is a source of knowledge and education instead of a propaganda tool.
Who are the authors?
They belong to the Midrand Group…young intellectuals whose mission has been to define our world beyond and away from the ANC. Their raison d'étre is the demise of the ANC. The book could, therefore, be viewed as a culmination of many years of discussion among them. The commitment to realise the book is seen when Mashele was a negotiator with the DA on behalf of Dr Mamphela Ramphele.
Fact or fiction?
The authors have sacrificed accuracy and fact for anecdotal inference, which they use as a means to propagate their views.
Sins of incumbency or negative tendencies
The ANC uses these terms to analyse the challenges facing us today. Such analysis derives from an attempt to understand today's realities…so that we find solutions.
This recognition is said to be an admission of demise.
Hatred for Jacob Zuma
Zuma is mentioned four times in the first page. This calls into question the ability of the writers to produce analysis. Hence an unsubstantiated assertion such as "Political and social developments are, by their nature, fluid, and anyone who pretends to have divine insight should be doubted”.
"Why do we seem to be experiencing reversal instead of building on the vision painstakingly laid by leaders such as Nelson Mandela?”
This is unsubstantiated and the facts point to the contrary. Mandela proclaimed the ANC policy for access to free medical care for pregnant women and for children up to six years old. Today, they receive free ARVs and the children, free healthcare. Also, 98% have access to electricity, 95% to clean water and sanitation.
Shallow understanding
This is reflected in their assertion that "the formation of the ANC in 1912 was a direct response to the whites-only Union government”. The authors deny the existence of the wars of resistance, the vigilante associations (provincial congresses) and the prophetic words of Pixley ka Isaka Seme in 1906.
These are factual historical events that preceded and led to the formation of the ANC. The authors also show their ideological position, exposing their lack of knowledge of ANC policy, by accusing it of declaring an intention to transfer the commanding heights of the economy to the state. The Freedom Charter is explicit that the people demand a mixed economy with an active state in the productive economy.
Struggle for a country
Questioning the ANC's readiness to govern is cynical. It disregards the experience every liberation movement undergoes - the transition from being a liberation movement to governing.
What the authors fail to say is that there have been four successive, majority ANC governments at national, provincial and local government levels. In 20 years, the ANC has delivered for the poor, managed the economy and monetary institutions efficiently and ensured that all state institutions function as directed in the Constitution.
What is the reality?
Predecessors of Mashele and Qobo predicted and worked for the fall of the ANC. Today the ANC is 102 years old and growing. The ANC has gone through various moments of renewal as characterised by specific historical events.
The ANC has developed under different leaders. Seeing Mbeki as a victim, instead of a great leader who committed mistakes, betrays the authors' lack of depth in understanding the ANC.
The authors speak in absolute terms, which is not the reality of the ANC. The ANC stands for certain values stated as building a united, non-racial, non-sexist, democratic and prosperous South Africa. This is the standard by which South Africa is judged.
The ANC cannot resent the progress it has made, it must celebrate it. The fall of the ANC is a sentiment shared among anti-majoritarian liberals who relegate people into objects. People who read this book must read JP Landman's The Long View to distil the difference between facts and fiction.
Mantashe is Secretary General of the ANC. This articles was first published by the City Press which made it available online since 26 February 2014 10:00: http://www.citypress.co.za/columnists/propaganda-disguised-fact/
Shooting the wrong enemy: Response to Prince Mashele
By Cde Mbulelo Mandlana
In his recent piece (Beware of African nationalism February 9 2014, The Sunday Independent) Prince Mashele argues that African nationalism has run out of its relevance as a philosophy. Its usefulness was limited only to the early anti-colonial struggles and has now in the post-colonial time, he argues, become nothing but a tool at the hands of the tyrannical rulers of the post-colonial Africa to subdue the "ordinary" Africans in the face of the unjust power of the ruling elite.
He argues that it is more than important today that ordinary Africans should beware of African nationalism. In the context of post-colonial scenario it has run out of uses and its inclination to "group"Africans is incompatible with the modern demands of development and democratic governance for it drowns the individual for the sake of the 'GROUP”. Mashele argues that the ANC of Jacob Zuma in its, supposedly tyrannical, rule of the people of South Africa relies on African Nationalism to guarantee itself immunity from criticism by blacks. This it does by pursuing a line of argument that urges black people to fear embarrassing their black leaders and therefore, by this logic, themselves and in doing so these black people should then protect Zuma and the Nkandla happenings. To quote and paraphrase Mashele "African Nationalism was born out of the colonial experience, it was used by liberation fighters to mobilize black people to be part of the quest for political liberations”.
Mashele further labours to make this point when he says "African Nationalism assigns to animalism blackness; it treats blacks as if, like beasts, they lack consciousness - the mental capability to be aware of one's surroundings. To close it off he asserts that the "ordinary"African made a mistake of thinking that African Nationalism would last forever. Of course I can reference many other passages that Mashele scribes to hammer home the point that the current historical moment needs less African Nationalism and more acknowledgement of the African as an independent individual who must not, as he says, unduly be subject to some tyrannical 'group' ideology.
One can deduce from the articulations of Mashele that his perspective is founded on the notion that since the fall of apartheid and colonialism Africans no longer need to be engaged in a discussion, collectively, to set out their shared duty in creation of a post-colonial Africa. One can deduce that it is Mashele's argument that since the fall of the apartheid state and direct colonial oppression Africans no longer need to coalesce at all, at least not on the basis of African nationalism.
But my argument is that Mashele is not necessarily speaking against African nationalism as an ideological persuasion; he is speaking against the very notion that human existence is a phenomenon whose very essence is collective cooperation. He is speaking against the very phenomenon that human beings need united action for historical progress to occur. He is, by doing so, making the most raw of liberal arguments that history is a function of the actions of brilliant individuals who by their sheer brilliance carry history on their shoulders while everybody else is merely fortunate to witness it in their lifetime or if they are literate read it from the books. He separates human thought and action from the totality of human existence as a contextual and historical experience and makes human thought and idea pure, objective and removed from material human existence and as such ascribe to the will and thought of an individual the triumph of epochs.
To make this point Mashele identifies African Nationalism not as an organic and revolutionary human instinct born of people who were resisting colonial oppression but as a tool "used by liberation fighters to mobilize black people to be part of the quest for political freedom”. In this quoted phrase Mashele makes three major mistakes. First, he accredits his "individuals"(the liberation fighters) as inventors of African Nationalism, a tool they used to mobilize blacks in quest for freedom. In this case freedom is their idea that they sponsor to black people. Secondly he portrays "black"people as a docile group of individuals who waited for liberation fighters to come to them with mobilization tool and subsequently acted as instructed. Lastly he erroneously, at least in the context of SADC liberation struggles, makes African Nationalism an exclusive tool to only liberate blacks whilst African Nationalism has been embraced by all freedom loving people regardless of race, it is precisely why the ANC mobilized all the people of the country to resist what the SACP called "the colonization of a special type”. In this fashion Mashele makes the greatest mistake of intellectual laziness, he manipulates history to serve his short term argument.
The truth of the matter is that African nationalism is an ideological persuasion whose roots lie in the more than three hundred years of resistance of the oppressed African people.
It is African Nationalism precisely because the colonial conquest was based on, among other things, the colonizers' persistent effort to wipe from history of the colonized their sense of nationhood, to destroy the power structures through which the colonized explained their social existence and defend that existence for the reason that it is crucial in constituting them as nations. To put it simply the colonizers sought to reduce nations who recognized their common destiny to a bunch of individuals who accidentally happen to share a geographic space with each other. The end game is that the unidentified individual is easier to coerce into thinking that his destiny is his own and has nothing to do with his or her class brother or sister. This is the ultimate hypocrisy of liberalism that it is an ideology of the rich in that it is only the rich who can go by denying that they are part of the sum total of society and that the social forces of that society govern and determine his social standing.
African Nationalism therefore developed and mutated in struggle and through active resistance and with passage of time and evolution of conditions to carry as part of its characteristics aspects as non-racialism and non-sexism and other features that define the progressive movement in the present day. So Mr Mashele needs to recognize that it is by now, even by the most extreme of liberals, an accepted idea that ideologies that shift historical epochs are not made in libraries and war rooms of liberation fighters or boardrooms of the Midrand Group but are organically produced in the grinding wheel of social change.
The issue however is that liberals believe that the end game is to liberate the individual from society while we on the last are vindicated every day that the end game is to constitute a just society based on the fundamental recognition that human existence and social justice are not anchored on elevation of the individual. African Nationalism is an organic product of the grinding wheel of social change as it was with Abolitionism in the times of slavery and as it was during the Renaissance times. It's the work of history.
However there is an ideological inconsistency in the articulations of Mashele that betrays his own inability to reconcile his liberalism and his inclination to accept that African Nationalism (as what he labels group mentality) was once useful.
He puts it this way "in the context of the fight against colonialism and apartheid, African Nationalism was indeed an emancipatory instrument."Before he mounts a deadly assault on this African Nationalism that he meekly credits here above, he first makes a timid assertion that African nationalism is a "herd"mentality and by implication equivalent to African chauvinism or some criminalistic cult belief. Then for the big bang, he boldly says "to reduce Africans into a nationalistic mass is to assault their basic humanity. It is to imply that, outside the mass, blacks are not normal human beings - they cannot think”. It's a contradiction because he offers no substantial and conceptual explanation now why he moves from one extreme to the next except an excuse that some dictators abused it.
If this argument was philosophically correct it would follow naturally then that we should do away with labour unions and worker organizations because some unionists have abused labour organizations, unions and so on. What of defenseless workers? Extinguish African Nationalism and replace it with the Mashele brand of liberal individualism. What of the citizens of Central African Republic who suffer the yoke of French meddling and regime changes? What of Zimbabwe that is subject to Western sanctions for carrying out a domestic land reform programme? (Whatever its shortcomings and there are several). African Nationalism continues to be relevant in the world where the world affairs continue to reflect an African continent that continues to pay debt of multitudes of years of colonialism and neo-colonialism. It is a collective cry of African people for complete self-determination in a geopolitical space that makes an African subhuman. Human solidarity is not an occasional need as Mashele argues it is rather the most consistent thread that cuts across all fundamental epoch as an indispensable ingredient for progress.
The enemy that Mashele is shooting is the wrong one: crucifying the wrong Jesus so to speak. The enemy is not the concept of African Nationalism. And the solution is not this blatant liberal individualism he preaches.
The fact that he sees and identifies the wrong enemy betrays his overt inclination to join the white liberal offensive against the people of South Africa, black in majority, which offensive persists to chastise the people of South Africa for supporting the ANC. It angrily and with patronizing tones at the same time shouts at them for believing in the transformation project that the ANC leads and in the capacity of the ANC to lead that project.
The only explanation this contingency has as to why our people believe in the ANC and its programme is that our people are brainwashed by some ideology and that they cannot, if they were in their right mind, repeatedly support the ANC. That perceived brainwashing instrument is what Mashele calls African Nationalism. To top it all Mashele and his colleagues believe that African Nationalism is about Black people. I have explained above how very grossly out of order that is. It is neither racist nor chauvinistic.
In the final analysis Mashele made a lot of liberal noise and raised nothing accurate nor worthy of respect as intellectual engagement. Which is truly not surprising. His anti-Jacob Zuma and ANC traits clearly surpassed whatever reasoning capabilities he had.
Cde Mbulelo Mandlana is the former President of SASCO. He is currently NEHAWU National Education Officer.
The ANC is the most reliable choice of our people, in alliance with the Communist Party, the progressive trade union and civic movements
28th Anniversary of the passing of Moses Mabhida,
Commemorative Lecture
Smiso Nkwanyana SACP District
Chesterville Hall, 25 February 2014
By Khaye Nkwanyana
It is with great honour to commemorate in this so important phase of our political setting, the life of the most outstanding leader, a communist, and trade unionist of note, leader of the national liberation movement and commander of the MK.
This year marks 28 years since Moses Mncane Mabhida (Umadevu) was buried in Maputo, Mozambique. He had caught up a stroke on his way to Cuba and later suffered the heart attack that took his life in Maputo.
Moses Mabhida belongs to that galaxy of leaders of the glorious 1950s-60s in the history of our struggle; leaders who, by their act and deeds, acquired the acceptance as primus inter pares with foremost political responsibility to direct the cause of struggle.
Mabhida rose from humble beginnings. Born in Thornville, Pietermaritzburg, his education was always disrupted to an extent that he did not complete his schooling. His last grade was 9 (Standard 7), which he did in Slangspruit. Amongst his last teachers was Harry Gwala. Apart from the inspiration he got from his father who was a dedicated trade unionist under the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union, Mabhida was influenced and inspired by Harry Gwala, who used to expose his students to Marxism. Gwala conducted political classes secretly. It is Gwala who introduced Mabhida to SACP and ANC, culminating in Mabida being involved in trade union work.
He organized Howick rubber workers union and chemical workers union in Pietermaritzburg. He joined the SACP in 1942. After the banning of the unions in 1952-53, he was ordered to organise workers underground in the then Natal. That work led to the formation of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU). He was elected in its founding congress as its first Deputy President in 1955. At this time he was serving as ANC Secretary in Pietermaritzburg, working closely and reporting to Chief Albert Luthuli. In 1956 he was elected to the ANC NEC.
After 1960 Sharpeville massacre, he was instrumental in organizing one of the big strikes in Hammersdale, outside Durban, at Hammersdale clothing industry. A warrant of arrest was issued against him and he was charged for "incitement”. This was the time of the state of emergency imposed by the apartheid regime as a sequel after the Sharpeville shootings. SACTU instructed Mabhida to leave the country to Prague to represent it in World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), also working with developing African unions including doing representations at International Labour Organisation (ILO).
After being re-elected in the ANC NEC in the Conference held in October 1962, Lebatse, Bechuanaland (now Botswana), he was instructed by Oliver Tambo to dedicate his full time in building MK in exile. He did so with diligence and became a Commissar and later Commander. He was appointed to the Revolutionary Council that was established in 1969 which later became Politico-Military Council that in 1979 produced what was known as "Green Book”.
Mabhida was very instrumental after Morogoro conference in setting up the ANC department of Intelligence and Security. After the death of Moses Kotane (SACP General Secretary) in 1978, Moses Mabhida was elected to assume this foremost position. He was very close to Mozambique's leadership, a relationship he built in his earlier travels across the continent where he met Samora Machel as a leader of FRELIMO at Kongwa, the first training camp in Tanzania. He was awarded by the Soviet Union the "Soviet Order of the people"and by Bulgarian government the "Order of the people's republic of Bulgaria first class”.
Our own democratic government honoured him in 2002 posthumously with the Order of Baobab.
In his eulogy at Mabhda's funeral, OR Tambo spoke:
'Mabhida had been educated in the stern university of mass struggle...
It is rarely given to a people that they should produce a single person who epitomises their hopes and expresses their common resolve as Moses Mabhida did. In simple language he could convey the aspirations of all our people in their magnificent variety, explain the fears and prejudices of the unorganised, and sense the feelings of even the most humble amongst our people.'
The President of Mozambique, Samora Machel authoritatively observed:
'We shall be the guardians of his body. Men who die fighting, who refuse to surrender, who serve the people and the ideals to the last breathe, are victors. Mabhida is a victorious combatant.'
This self-taught all-round leader represented the true description of Gramsci's classification of organic intellectuals who are taught by history as makers of history themselves being part of the people. Mabhida as a steeped Marxist-Leninist had an ability to translate difficult thoughts into digestible terms for the ordinary level headed cadre to understand.
It is of no value to just meet and recite the memories of such leaders without saying what practical lessons we should draw from them and what lenses do we use as magnifying glass to diagnose conjectural political questions and perfect characterisations of moments as they obtain in our full view.
The spirits of leaders like Moses Mncane Mbeki Mabhida can only be propelled by witnessing us drawing revolutionary inspiration to them and undoing what amounts to a counter-revolution against our own revolution, such as corruption, stealing public money for personal wealth, shoddy service by some of our public servants, dereliction of duty by paying leap service in radically transforming the colonial architecture in the structure of our economy and therefore racially skewed class relations. Lukewarm empowerment to the people economically in various forms as direct beneficiaries of our economic activities is but part of what need to change.
As communists, we can honour a leader like Mabhida through building the Party. We need a strong party; we need a party with cadres of special type; cadres that are diligent; cadres that seek no personal glory and fame but loyal servants of the party. A good party cadre is the one who moves mountains but allowed others to claim that victory and glory. We don't need cadres of the party who are obsessed with sniffing deployments; cadres who run from ear-to-ear in the mid-night hours lobbying for themselves to be elected in our congresses than being asked to be available by structures.
There is a difference between members of the Party and cadres of the party. The above features distinguish a cadre of the Party and a mere member regardless of level of involvement in the party. Moses Mabhida and Moses Kotane best represent these attributes. We need to build a party of this special type of cadres.
Towards ANC election victory
It is a foregone conclusion that the ANC, once again, will emerge victorious in May 7 elections. But this will not come about without our sweat. We are in the height of the campaign and we are narrating to our people the historical record that the ANC government over the past 20 years has done and what it has not, and what it is busy doing or intends to do. We are coming clean to our people. A lot of combined effort by opposition parties, who are shouting from the oasis of middle class trappings, to vassalage the public standing of the ANC has been sustained in an unmitigated fashion. But they always get it wrong because they always fail to discern the collective psychology and sensibilities of our people.
The more you are obsessed with attacking the ANC or its leaders is the more our people are suspicions about you. Majority of our people agrees that today is better than yesterday and that tomorrow will be better than today. They understand that more than 300 years of warped colonial development that informed South Africa's physiognomy cannot be wiped out completely in the period of 20 years. They know that ANC cares about them and it is a credible party to continue to move South Africa forward. Our people are not prepared for chancers. This country is not in a stage of trial and error involving the untested parties given government. It is only the ANC that carries the real aspirations of our people and is tested in government.
EFF: Is it new political behemoth or an innocuous ballistic snake?
All reactionaries are paper tigers. In appearance, the reactionaries are terrifying, but in reality they are not so powerful. From a long term point of view, it is not the reactionaries but the people who are powerful"- (Mao, selected works. Vol. IV, p. 100)
It has become trite from the past few months when flipping over newspapers to get long kisses from articles pre-empting the hard time that the ANC will find in these 2014 elections and locating such organisations as EFF, Agang SA and DA as the forces that would radically reduce the ANC base, especially the EFF. It may very well be that this positive profiling of the opposition to ANC is subjective in order to promote these organisations and thereby defile the ANC to its support base.
The formation of the political organisation led, in the main, by the former ANCYL leaders represents another episode in the series of what the ANC, after 1955 adoption of the Freedom Charter, got accustomed to as a movement. The various elements within the ANC ranks that left in various forms (either as dissidents or being formally expelled) and therefore formed political parties that ranged against the ANC have been an occasional norm since the 50s.
The PAC is but one of these formations. Today it is under health life-support if indeed it is still functionally existing. The UDM under General Bantu Holomisa (the first one in the post-apartheid terrain) is another organisation, formed by a former ANC leader after being expelled for his ill-discipline. The UDM is almost extinct. The Shilowa COPE faction flavour will not alter that state of affairs.
More recently, COPE today, barely more than five years, is in doldrums. It is a shadow of itself (i.e. itself as it never was but as it was projected by the media). If it still exists organisationally, it is only in the figment of the imagination of those who still believe it still does.
But what does EFF represent?
There is no doubt that when these individuals were still comrades within the ANCYL they radicalized the youth league in various forms. But in the process of doing so, they committed serious mistakes, such as unmitigated arrogance, prone to invectives, creating untenable situations to the ANC by prematurely calling for leadership change and tossing in air of their preferred candidates in ways so outlandish to the movement; they insulted leaders in ways far extreme than the DA can do. This was pursued under the basis of a distorted conception of the dialectical relationship between ANC and its league (i.e. organisational and political autonomy as it was dangled).
Unfortunately, these foreign tendencies they exhibited account much in the todays violent protests where the youth leads those whose bad conduct is destroying community infrastructure such as libraries, community halls, street robots and burning councillors houses at times. Whereas protests should be encouraged as a form of demonstrating dissatisfaction and a demand for attention to what is required, the violent degeneration has gone into the worst abyss of lumpen drive that demobilizes even the salient sympathy in some quarters. ANCYL by its strategic location and attachment to the ANC transmit moral authority with its conduct and deeds to the youth sector, which they take their cue from. It is a microcosm of what the youth looks like.
The EFF will get votes from sections of the youth and others who cannot see beyond the river bank. Unfortunately we have a chunk of those people whose perspectives and their general view is jaundiced.
The hype about EFF is similar to that of 2009 COPE. Where is it today?
Once its leadership is in parliament arising from whatever they may garner not sooner than later many of those people who would have voted for them will be disillusioned and therefore come in droves back to the ANC as the election fever will have come to pass after a year or two. EFF is an ephemeral. Its linchpin is based on hatred and anger not against the status quo but an anger against President Jacob Zuma and the ANC. This obsession with Zuma or what they call Zuma-ANC is just an evidence of an organisation playing "half-ground football and using off-side traps"against the opponent than imposing their game to win.
The foremost leaders of EFF have been part of the ANC and defended ANC policies and government programs yesterday. They campaigned with us in 2009 and 2011 local government elections for the ANC under Zuma presidency. And so, they have no moral standing today to criticise the same that which they have defended and justified in previous two elections and unilaterally declared they will kill for it. If there is anything to characterise this is that it is opportunism of the worst kind.
EFF speaks about standing for the real socialist revolution they want to pursue. From which terrain within which this revolution will be pursuit, what are their motive forces? Are they themselves collectively committed in the most serious and fundamental way to Socialism (think about Dali Mpofu now). The Left rhetoric seem to be a well-disguised revolutionary subterfuge.
The ANC 1969 Strategy and Tactics reminds us:
'The revolutionary-sounding phrases does not always reflect revolutionary policy, and revolutionary-sounding policy is not always the springboard for revolutionary advance. Indeed what appears to be militant and revolutionary can often be counter-revolutionary.'
Revolution is a serious, protracted and an elusive pursued. It has its ebbs and flows. It is not a rectilinear beam that proceeds in straight line in the wish of the operator. The ebbs and flows are a function of the balance of forces at each historical moment and phase. The balance of forces can tilt against the revolutionary movement not out of its willing but as a consequence of global environment that informs domestic environment and therefore impedes the pace and tempo of the revolution.
Even a seasoned revolutionary movement has to tread carefully and where tactical detours need to be adopted (as opposed to strategic detours) must be done so that the overall trajectory is not lost whilst working with progressive forces and the left all-over the world to counterweight imperialist hegemony and whilst working on tilting the balance of forces.
This is not a matter of subjective choice but a reality in a world dominated by one strand of thought. The absence of political wisdom in discharging those tactical retreats and advances will result in what we witnessed in Zimbabwe's economic and social collapse of the past decade.
The EFF has not articulated as to what type of social-makeup they conceive of this society away from what it is about and aspires to be. The mere delivery of land to the dispossessed whilst important and nationalisation of mines does not tamper with the societal structural makeup as is currently. The doubling of social grants to the 17 million South Africans is unrealistic and unsustainable from the fiscus (as contained in their manifesto). A lot of elements in their manifesto do not depart much from ANC commitments and what it is doing except to go in the extremes. The ANC remains the best option for our people.
El Commandant Fidel Castro once put it 'A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between the future and the past.'
In the longer term EFF will not be a political behemoth. The media hype that has saturated the room about them is associated with the season of elections as it with COPE in 2008/09 after which the obsession went down. I see no green mamba poison to game-change our politics as led by the ANC and its alliance.
Conclusion.
In the true spirit of Moses Mabhida let us all go out and explain to our people in the townships, rural villages and in various areas, that the ANC in alliance with the Communist Party, the progressive trade union and civic movements is the only political party that has a vision to take this country forward. We know there is still more work that needs to be done as well as rectifying that which did not go well. The ANC is attending to that. The ANC led government is a government of the people and we are for the people with them, side by side.
Thank you!
Khaye Nkwanyana is the PEC and PWC MEMBER of the SACP in KwaZulu Natal responsible for Communication.
